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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29797014">Scars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mairyn/pseuds/Mairyn'>Mairyn</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Grey Stone and Scorched Earth [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Final Fantasy XIV</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Blood and Injury, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, M/M, Scars</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 17:07:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,487</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29797014</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mairyn/pseuds/Mairyn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Haurchefant finally asks about the scar on Bram's face. Bram opens up about Yanxia, his mother, and the life he left behind.</p><p>OC character study, detailing my WoL's past and trauma. Rated M for a child sustaining a serious injury.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Haurchefant Greystone/Warrior of Light</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Grey Stone and Scorched Earth [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2283296</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Scars</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>TW: Contains blood and the description of a child sustaining a serious injury. Please feel free to skip this fic if this makes you uncomfortable!</p><p>I've always wanted to write out a fic explaining Bram's scar and his name change. So here it is.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They were in the tender aftermath of lovemaking--clean, warm, and drowsy beneath the thick quilts in Haurchefant’s quarters--when Bram felt the elezen drift one gentle fingertip along the scar spanning from his right eyebrow across to the leftmost edge of his jaw. An intimate action, and something he wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else, but from Haurchefant it felt like a caress. Deeper still he could feel the suggestion of a question Haurchefant hadn’t yet asked. Perhaps he felt it was too traumatic or dire an injury to ask after, or perhaps he simply felt it wasn’t his business. While with anyone else Bram would agree it was all of those things and more, there in the comfortable embrace of his lover, he found he didn’t mind telling the tale.</p><p>“Do you want to know what happened?” Bram asked quietly. As a peace offering, he turned his head to kiss the palm of the hand now resting against his jaw.</p><p>Haurchefant gazed back at him with careful eyes, as if judging the truth of his willingness. Eventually he replied, “If you’d like to share it.”</p><p>“It’s not so dissimilar from your own,” Bram began and thumbed the raised mound of scar tissue on Haurchefant’s stomach, where Zephirin’s spearhead had nearly torn him asunder. It was still tender, but newly healed to the point where the elezen could resume his post at Camp Dragonhead. Thordin and his knights had fallen, but the war with Nidhogg yet raged on. The bastard son of House Fortemps was all too eager to fight another day. “I got it protecting my sister.”</p><p>“How old were you?” Haurchefant asked. Over the elezen’s shoulder, Bram watched fresh snowfall drift lazily behind the glass of the window.</p><p>Bram had intended to gloss over that particular dagger, but since Haurchefant asked, he obliged. “Ten.”</p><p>Haurchefant’s face melted into a mixture of dread and sympathy, and he leaned forward to kiss him, letting his lips convey what words could not. Bram caressed his lover’s cheek and pulled away after the swell of emotions between them had run their course. The impulse to apologize for his trauma rose, but he stifled it. Haurchefant loved him. He’d asked to share this burden.</p><p>“It’s alright,” he promised. After a short silence he joked, “I lived.”</p><p>“Halone’s blessings be praised for that.” Haurchefant rested their foreheads together for a moment, then pulled back to continue listening.</p><p>“The Garleans invaded Yanxia less than a year before I was born,” Bram said, and allowed his half-Garlean heritage to do the speaking for him on that particular matter. “Mina and I never got to live in a world freed from their rule. As children we were taught to keep away from the soldiers at all costs, and to never be too noisy or draw attention to ourselves, so that we could continue to live peacefully.”</p><p>He sighed, lamenting the truth. “It didn’t matter. There was some new crisis every week. More and more of the village’s men were drawn away as the years passed. On the bad days there were beatings; rarely there was worse. Eventually my mother told us to choose our favorite things to take with us, because we were heading for Eorzea. It was sudden. She tried her best to hurry us, but Mina and I were children. We didn’t know what we were doing.” Bram shook his head. “The uprising began before we could get out.”</p><p>“Uprising?” Haurchefant asked.</p><p>“It was a small, futile thing,” Bram explained, remembering the good men and women who’d lost their lives that day. “What few who remained in the village and could fight decided they’d rather lose their lives to earn a few weeks of freedom than keep living the way they were. They started attacking the soldiers, which was of course a terrible plan without any real backup.”</p><p>Bram wondered for the first time if that was perhaps why his mother had tried to rush them. If she’d heard the whisperings and wanted to leave before things went south. A spark of guilt ignited in his chest. Perhaps if they’d been just a little faster… He shook the thought from his head. He had to.</p><p>“The soldiers retaliated in earnest. One broke into our home and cut down my mother without a second thought. Killed her in a single stroke. And I--”</p><p>Bram became lost to the memory, trying his best to not recall the blood pooling around his mother’s corpse, the way Mina had screamed until it sounded painful, wide-eyed and bodily shivering. She hadn’t been able to sleep well for months following that night. Perhaps even years. But truth be told, Bram hadn’t been able either.</p><p>“I don’t know,” he conceded when at last the memory had passed. “My mother kept my father’s sword as a memento and showed it to me a time or two. She was trying to soften me towards him, I suppose. It didn’t work, but it wound up coming in handy. I ran into her room and grabbed it. I didn’t know the first thing about using a blade, but I hurried into the entryway with the sword in hand and found my sister cornered by the soldier that’d killed my mother.”</p><p>Haurchefant’s arms tightened around Bram, and Bram gratefully rested his forehead against the elezen’s shoulder. Mina had looked so small then. Too small, like a porcelain doll. She was screaming, shielding her head, terrified. Bram hadn’t even thought about what he was doing. He acted on pure impulse.</p><p>“I shouted, and he turned and swung his blade, slashing me across the face,” Bram said, and though he was certain he was imagining it, his scar seemed to throb with the memory. Head wounds bled like nothing else. Gods, there’d been so much blood. “It was painful like nothing I’d ever known, but I was desperate. I jabbed my father’s sword into the bastard’s stomach and twisted it, hard. He fell to his knees, I grabbed Mina, and I ran. He didn’t come after us. I found out later he’d died of the wound. I was sick with my injury, but I didn’t stop until we were able to find a place to hide until the noise stopped.”</p><p>Bram went silent. That was more or less the entire story. He swallowed thickly, but no tears threatened to fall. It was an old wound, a night he’d replayed in his head tens of thousands of times in the twenty years since.</p><p>“Bram…” Haurchefant said, futilely, stroking Bram’s unbound hair gently. “I can’t even begin to imagine--”</p><p>“As much as it bled,” Bram said, lighter, “It wasn’t that serious. It was a clean cut, and easily stitched. Mina dragged me half-conscious to a physician when the night had ended, and they tended to me until I was well again.” He pulled his head from Haurchefant’s shoulder and looked his lover in the eyes. “I try to think of it as a badge of honor: Mina was the first person I ever managed to save, and I can’t look at myself without remembering it. My sister’s life, for a scar.”</p><p>“That’s a noble way to think of it,” Haurchefant agreed, and traced the scar one more time before leaning in to lightly kiss Bram just once more. “As ever, you inspire me.”</p><p>Bram smiled gently, and traced Haurchefant’s newest scar again in return. “Foolish as it is, someday I hope I can help Othard find freedom again.”</p><p>“It isn’t foolish at all,” Haurchefant chided. “Your countrymen deserve no less, and I’ve no doubt you’ll succeed if given the opportunity.” Reflecting on that thought, he laughed good-naturedly. “Halone knows if you’ve nigh restored peace to Ishgard, anything is possible.”</p><p>Someday, Bram promised himself, he would do what he had to in order to liberate his homeland. He owed it to the child he’d been, to his sister, screaming in the remains of a broken home. To his country, and to the people they’d left behind. His old name drifted into his mind, then, and on a whim, emboldened by his confessional, he broke his own rule.</p><p>“Bram isn’t my real name,” he quietly confessed. When Haurchefant looked confused, he clarified, “I mean, it is my name, now. And it’s what I’d like you to continue calling me. But back in Yanxia, before my mother passed away, she called me Kimihiro. I didn’t want to be the same person anymore when I left, so I changed it. I stole the name from the sailor who gave us passage to Limsa Lominsa.” Suddenly anxious, he added, “It doesn’t change anything, I just. I wanted you to know.”</p><p>Haurchefant smiled at him fondly, and drew him to his chest. “Thank you for trusting me.”</p><p>“Thank you for listening,” he replied.</p><p>And in the quiet of the night, the weight of the past hanging heavy between them, they drifted, slowly, to sleep.</p>
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